How’d you spend your New Year’s Eve? Me, I realized I didn’t have a finished, colored version of this strip and I had to re-dialogue and recolor the whole thing. Hooray! I’ve included the rough draft version. The dialogue I had was T Campbell’s first draft, which we’d retool a bit before publishing — Dina’s change probably came after T read the previous story with Joe/Dina. Also, notice we’re back to Anime Ace for the typeface, since this was first done back before I got my Walkyfont.

I got to design a new ship! It was fun.

RIP the original CGI SEMME Complex that you could see out the window. That only exists on my hard drive as the background of a Joyce commission.

Here’s T’s commentary:

Pretty sure I did the basic setup in panels 1 and 2 and whatever I came up with after that, we didn’t use. David gives the team a roomier vessel than before here, which will come in handy when it accommodates some extra passengers. His choice of the GI Joe movie theme is one of the anthems of our generation, though the last 16 years of military history mean I can’t enjoy it as unironically as I used to. Given Joyce and Walky’s mix of naivete an heroism, I’m not sure if that means it now feels less appropriate here or more.

Discussion (9) ¬

Crossovers are interesting – and tricky to write – because much of the writing has to be dual-purpose. You have to introduce the characters and premise to readers with no context for them, but without being redundant or boring to those who do have context.

One way to do it that’s used in the last panel is to give characters some comedy bits that establish character. If you know who they are, you laugh; if you don’t know who they are, you learn a little bit about them, and then laugh.

Even the exposition has to do this to an extent. It provides the immediate information that’s necessary for the crossover, but also casually mentions other things that are already established in that universe – there’s an organization called SEMME, there are aliens that it presumably fights, and there’s some sort of reality-warping entity called The Cheese. And it does it without throwing those things in the reader’s face, like “Here’s the entire history of SEMME up to this point”, it just has them exist.